O.C. immigrant's good works reconnect her to Afghan heritage
As a girl, Parisa Popalzai learned that her heritage contained the stuff of fairy tales, that she was in fact descended from Afghan royalty. Imagine, a 19th century emir in the family.
Her family left Afghanistan when she was 4, and she's so Americanized now at 33 that her lineage makes more for fun conversation than for any sense of entitlement. Besides, when you work in a sandwich and yogurt shop -- which she did for a time as a teenager in Redlands -- you are officially working-class.
Whatever royalty she enjoys now comes from living in Orange County with a husband and 18-month-old son and having a job with a consulting firm.
Nothing very regal about that.
But the homeland beckons. Not so much with a call to return but with a voice Popalzai hears from within telling her that she can help her war-weary countrymen. That she must help them.
In a few weeks, her family will visit Afghanistan. Popalzai will eyeball two projects that connect the dots in her life from Kabul to Costa Mesa. One is a school that her aunt set up for disabled youngsters and that Popalzai hopes to sustain through a nonprofit organization she's establishing in California. She also has translated a teachers' guide that she'll deliver to the school and distribute throughout the country.
Project No. 2 is a private university in Jalalabad that she helped start with her brother-in-law and some of his colleagues. It offers master's degrees in business administration as well as other diploma programs. At its inception in 2007, she merely offered her brainpower to her brother-in-law and his colleagues.
"I got more and more involved," Popalzai says, smiling, "to the point I'm now the president of the university."
Not as crazy as it sounds for a woman living in Costa Mesa. With a doctorate in Islamic studies and a master's in management science from UCLA's Anderson School of Management, Popalzai can do the kind of online fundraising, grant-writing, curriculum planning and accounting that a new school needs. Popalzai jokes that she even has a hand in the university's website.
Yes, she has asked herself if she should be in Afghanistan to pursue the twin passions.
The answer, she says, is not now. "I feel like I can do a lot here, so I don't need to make that sacrifice yet," she says as we talk in a shopping center near an Irvine lake. "I feel I am a bit disconnected [from the university project], but my main purpose for the school is to find funding for it. For that I need to be here."
